american sales tax vs european VAT are 2 different things..
in america sales tax is meant for anything sold.
in europe VAT is for anything that's become more valuable since its initial creation.
EG potato's dont have VAT, but if a supermarket had a restaurant and cooked the potato's put them on a plate offering a knife and fork, then basically people will perceive that potato to be worth more due to the extra work put into it. thus VAT is added to a cooked meal at a restaurant.
you can buy raw gold VAT free. but as soon as its shaped into something special again VAT is added.
in short look at what VAT stands for "VALUE ADDED TAX" and then think to yourself, what value is being added simply by selling raw bitcoins. the only time i can consider there to ever be VALUE added. is if the bitcoins are sold at a premium due to being in a casasius coin or novelty printed bitcoin bearerbond.
if you ever got charged VAT for selling dollars to euros or euros to pounds, then and only then would anyone consider bitcoin to be in the same situation to be in the scope of VAT. but its not.
i do hate it when people that dont even understand what VAT truly means, tries to suggest that in some manner VAT should be taken for simply swapping currencies
That's a great summary of the thinking behind VAT and why it makes no sense to put it on bitcoin sales (as opposed to on fees exchanges charge when they sell you bitcoins). The hitch is that not everybody's tax legislation is necessarily well enough written to translate the purpose you describe into law.
I don't know anything about Estonian law but here in Japan it looks like we could end up with a situation where businesses have to collect VAT (1) on bitcoin sales but they can then reclaim it against VAT they already owe, resulting in a lot of paper-shuffling busywork and a net tax take of zero or less. I'm sure the tax authorities would rather avoid doing this, but they may not be able to find an adequate loophole...
(1) Japanese VAT is branded as "consumption tax", apparently because the post-war US occupation authorities levied a VAT and it was unpopular so the current government likes to pretend its tax is different to their tax, but it walks and talks like a VAT.
PS IANAL and I'm just pulling this out of my arse but I wonder if guys like Maidsafe and Ethereum who got around securities laws by claiming to be selling tokens for a service (storage or computing or whatever) will find themselves in a different bucket. If I'm buying storage via Maidsafe it feels like there must be some value added _somewhere_... If it's not collected when I buy the tokens, when is it collected?
